Ethernet is a widely field deployed protocol and often used for a very large variety of applications. Gigabit Ethernet (GbE or 1 GigE) in recent years has become widely deployed and generally allows data speeds of approximately 1 Gb/sec, with an actual line rate of approximately 1.25 Gb/sec of 8B/10B encoded data. It is expected that speed increases will occur as time goes by (such as 10GE, 100GE).
Often the usable distance of such high speed Ethernet networks is limited by optical or electrical signal degradation. In the optical case, such signal degradation often requires signal regeneration or the use of more sophisticated and expensive optical interfaces that are able to tolerate transmission impairments.
Various solutions to this issue have been attempted in the relatively cheap electrical domain. History has already proven that electronic domain processing can typically deliver better performances at lower price when compared to optical domain techniques.
One such example is Forward Error Correction (FEC). In telecommunication and information theory, FEC is generally a system of error control for data transmission, whereby the sender adds redundant data to its messages, also known as an error-correction code. This allows the receiver to detect and correct errors (within some bound) without the need to ask the sender for additional data.
Like reference symbols in the various drawings indicate like elements.